He flipped his palms to the ceiling as if to say, Why not? “Because it’s the right thing?”
He sat next to me on the bed, keeping a safe distance between us.
I rolled my eyes. “No one does anything because it’s the right thing,” I said.
“You do.”
“I do?”
Maybe that was true, but even if it was, how would he know it? We’d known each other for all of twenty minutes total.
“You do,” Pete said, this time with emphasis. “Except when you threatened to kill me, that is.”
I had to laugh at that.
“But I didn’t actually kill you, so it doesn’t count.”
“Seriously,” he said. “Everyone in the palace has been whispering about Dorothy’s latest prisoner. I knew it had to be you. The girl I rescued from the tin farm. Ever since I saw you, I just had a feeling. I feel responsible for you.”
Only then did it occur to me that this was the first time I’d ever had a boy in my bed. The circumstances were less than ideal.
Not that it mattered at a time like this. I was trapped in a cell in a strange kingdom, facing an inevitable sentence of a Fate Worse Than Death. It wasn’t the moment to be shopping for a boyfriend.
“How did you know I would be there?” I asked. “When my trailer crashed by the pit. If you work all the way over here in the palace, how did you know I was there? I mean, you got there right in the nick of time. Any later and I’d have fallen in.”
“I just had a feeling,” he said, shifting in his seat. “I just—I don’t know. It was just like someone was calling me there, so I went.”
Part of me didn’t care that he was obviously still lying. He’d been right—after all the hours locked away in here, all alone, it really did help just to have him sitting next to me. Just to hear another human voice, to be able to ask a question and get an answer back, even if it wasn’t the right answer.
Then that faraway, distracted look crossed his face again, the same look I’d seen him get the day I met him, just before he left me. It was the look of someone trying to place a distant tune that only he could hear.
His body seemed to flicker in and out, to grow hazy around the edges, but it was so faint I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my imagination. It reminded me of the hologram of Ozma we’d seen on the road.
He stood up abruptly. This time, I thought I knew what was coming. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Why . . . ?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’ll try to help you if I can.” Then, before I could protest, before I could even stand to say good-bye, he had pulled a big brass key from the pocket of his loose, white gardener’s pants. He walked across the cell in three quick strides and plunged it into a space in the wall where there was no keyhole. The stone rippled around it like he’d just dropped a pebble in a pond.
The door appeared. He pushed it open.
“Pete,” I said. My voice cracked unexpectedly as I said it. I just wanted him to look at me. He didn’t. He stepped out, the door sealed up, and I was alone again.
Chapter Eleven
After that, I really lost track of time. I slept, I sat, I slept some more and forced down the disgusting bowls of porridge that would now and then, without warning, materialize on the ever-pristine floor of my prison.
I looked out the enchanted, evil window. Sometimes it was night and sometimes it was day. When the moon was out, I tried to judge the passage of time by its phases, but it was no use. It would be full one moment and a thin thumbnail crescent the next, and then—when I turned away and looked for it again—gone entirely.
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to play hide-and-seek with Star, but it was pointless. There was no place to hide except under the bed, and anyway, only Star was small enough to fit down there.
With nothing to do except think, my mind kept returning to my mother. I was ashamed of myself for how little I’d thought about her since I’d come to Oz, but now I couldn’t stop wondering whether she had made it through the tornado, about whether she was searching for me or whether she was laid up somewhere, drunk or stoned or whatever else.
If there was even a chance she was out there, looking for me or hoping I’d make it home okay, then I couldn’t give up. I’d made a promise to myself that I’d do anything to help Ollie and his family, thinking that my mother was beyond my help—but now I realized that, no matter how far away my mother was, no matter how far gone she might be, I would always feel a sense of obligation to her.
Then again, it’s not like I was in much of a position to help anyone right now. Honestly, I could use a little help myself.
After two or three days—I think, but who knew?—Pete came to me again.
“I don’t have long,” he said, stepping through the door. His voice was strained with uncharacteristic panic. “Your trial is tomorrow,” he said. “The news is all over the palace.”
I sat up in bed with a start. I had been down here so long now that I’d nearly forgotten I had a trial coming up at all. The wild look in Pete’s eyes reminded me that, as bad as things were, they could still get worse.
“What exactly does a trial entail?” I asked, still holding out some irrational hope that maybe I could be exonerated.
He shook his head and looked down at his hands.
“Just tell me,” I said. “Maybe there’s some trick to it. Things like that always work in fairy tales.”
“Do you honestly think this is a fairy tale?” Pete asked.
“Just tell me what to expect.”
He sighed, finally relenting. “Her Royal Highness’s kangaroo court. It’s a total joke,” he said. “I think the only reason she bothers with trials at all is because she likes wearing the big white wig. Once you go to trial, you’re already as good as guilty. I don’t think there’s ever been a not-guilty verdict as long as the court’s been in existence.”
In the face of my impending Fate Worse Than Death sentence, I found that I was surprisingly calm. Maybe it just didn’t seem real.
“So what do I do?” I asked.
Pete looked at his hands. He tousled his hair, and then looked back at me in sheepish apology. “We could make a break for it,” he said. “Maybe with two of us, we could fight our way past the guards.”
We both knew what a dumb idea it was. “That will just get us both killed,” I said. “What’s the point of that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“What about magic? I mean, this is Oz, right? Isn’t there some spell that would work? It doesn’t even have to be a good one.”
He shook his head. “I never learned to do magic,” he said. “I was never good at it, and no one ever thought it was important for a gardener to learn, especially once Dorothy made it illegal for anyone except her and her friends to practice it. I wouldn’t even be able to cast a simple extinguishing spell without it setting off the magical alarms and going on trial myself.”
“What about someone else? Do you know anyone who would give you, like, some kind of mystical trinket or something? I mean, I don’t know . . .”
“I thought of that. I talked to every illegal practitioner I could think of and none of them will help. It’s too risky. Anyway, I doubt anything like that would work down here. There are anti-magic wards everywhere in the dungeons. You’d have to be really powerful to break through them. Like, Glinda powerful.”
“Some magic shoes would really come in handy right about now, huh?” I said.
“Seriously. Maybe . . .” He stopped himself.